A Town Hall Burns in Limoges While Nvidia and Apple Pay for a White House Ballroom

Public buildings were the week’s subject, and two countries treated them in opposite ways.

On Thursday 15 October the Washington Post obtained the internal ledgers of the campaign paying for the new ballroom at the White House. It has brought in $333 million. At least $77 million came from donors whose names appear nowhere; fifty-seven pledges exceeded $100,000; Nvidia and Apple each put up $25 million, Alphabet $22 million through a lawyer’s trust, Microsoft and Palantir $10 million apiece. One donor had pledged $2.5 million a year earlier, and her father, a banker, received a presidential pardon in January. Nothing here breaks a rule, construction continues, and the president’s line is that it costs the taxpayer nothing.

Two days later the French city of Limoges lost its own civic building. Several hundred demonstrators forced the main door with a battering ram, according to Mayor Guillaume Guerin, who noted that the national police had been deployed to a march a few streets away. By Sunday morning the 43-metre belfry had come down into a hall that opened in 1883, a listed neo-Renaissance echo of the Paris Hôtel de Ville that had come through two world wars untouched. Prefect Maurice Barate said only the west wing survived and called the loss a disaster for France’s heritage.

Walls bought on one side of the Atlantic and walls broken on the other: the distance between the governing and the governed was measured this week in masonry. Marseille’s city hall lobby was briefly occupied, a tourist office in Lyon was set alight, and in Paris the plinth of the Marianne on the place de la République was taken apart by hand.

A third thread runs beneath those two and travels faster than either. The school blockade that began in the northern suburbs of Paris reached Syntagma Square in Athens on Tuesday, the education ministry in Tirana on Wednesday, the universities of Buenos Aires on Thursday and ten Italian cities on Friday, with no shared secretariat anywhere in the chain. Meanwhile two badges of standing stopped working in China at once: a degree taken abroad and a French monogram. The teenager at a school gate in Lyon and the shopper reselling a handbag in Shanghai have nothing in common except the habit of pricing what used to be taken for granted.